Recipes and news from the makers of Zest Recipe Manager

Frittatas are a such a wonderfully easy way to feed guests. They can work at any meal, cook quickly, and the eggy base can take on so many flavours. In this case we have a triumvirate of taste: a sweet leek base, a fresh basil hit all laced with a little luxury: saffron. I know these gorgeous red threads are ridiculously expensive, but if handled correctly you only need a tiny bit to permeate an entire dish with their wonderful, unique flavour. The key is to steep the threads in warm liquid: I usually use water but opted for milk here for a little extra creaminess. Just look at the colour!

This pinch of threads is only about a quarter of a tiny packet, less than $2 worth, and the flavour was amazing!

A few tips for this frittata:

I’ve included fried potato to turn this into a meal of its own. With a side salad, and perhaps a little bread, this makes a perfect lunch. To simplify the recipe (and cut the cooking time) you can leave out the potato and you still have a wonderful breakfast or side.

If you’re really in a hurry you can cheat further and mostly cook the frittata on the stovetop, almost like an omelet, then transfer to the grill to brown the top. It will cook in just a few minutes!

Always remove a frittata from the oven when it is slightly underdone as it will continue to cook in the hot pan. If you overcook it the eggs dry out and ruin the texture.

This is a versatile dish, so don’t be afraid to experiment!

Leek Saffron and Basil Frittata

Prep time: 10 mins

Cook time: 30 mins

Total time: 40 mins

Serves: 4

Ingredients

2 leeks, halved lengthwise then sliced into 1cm pieces.

2 waxy potatoes, diced into 1cm cubes

6 eggs

1/4 cup milk

Pinch of saffron

Small handful basil, finely chopped (reserve a few leaves for the top of the frittata)

50g butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Preheat oven to 180°C.

Heat milk to just below boiling and add saffron threads. Allow to stand and infuse while you prepare the other ingredients.

Melt 35g butter with 1/2 a tablespoon of oil in a frying pan over a low heat. Fry leeks gently, stirring regularly, until translucent and tender (about 10 minutes). Set aside.

The in-laws’ fig tree is in full season now and we are spoiled with an abundance of beautiful fresh fruit. I decided that I should use some in a cake for a change, and had all sorts of ideas lined up before I hit the fridge … and saw we had almost no butter (gasp!). Leaving aside how we could ever be so lax as to let this happen, the problem was compounded by the fact that this was on Good Friday and the shops were closed!

Luckily, just a few weeks before, I had baked my first ever yoghurt cake: my Zest Test of the London Bakes Lemony Yoghurt Cake. Yoghurt and olive oil to the rescue! My recipe, though heavily based on this original, is tweaked to be slightly less sweet and more structured so it can accommodate the figs. The idea to throw in a bit of rosemary came from this amazing looking Honey and Rosemary Upside Down Fig Cake on Delicious Everyday. So with thanks to my fellow bloggers for their ideas, this Fig and Rosemary Yoghurt cake was born!

The results are gorgeous. Just like the original Lemony version on London Bakes this cake is amazingly moist and moorish, and the hint of rosemary laced through works brilliantly. It’s one of those little additions that delights and surprises on first taste — people will be asking you what is in this cake! 🙂

Fig and Rosemary Yoghurt Cake

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 50 mins

Total time: 1 hour 5 mins

A moist and moorish cake topped with delicate figs and laced with a rosemary surprise.

Ingredients

175g caster sugar

2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh rosemary leaves

125g almond meal

50g plain flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

180g greek or other natural yoghurt

120ml extra virgin olive oil

2 large eggs

For the top:

4 figs, trimmed and halved lengthwise

2 tablespoons brown sugar

To serve:

Fresh figs, quartered (optional)

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 170°C. Grease and line a loaf tin with baking paper (I recommend using a piece large enough lay right across the tin hanging out two sides so you can lift the cake out).

Add the caster sugar and rosemary to a large mixing bowl. Mash together with your fingertips to infuse some rosemary flavour in the sugar.

Add the almond meal, flour, baking powder and salt and mix well.

Whisk the eggs and add them to the mixture along with the yogurt and olive oil. Stir until thoroughly combined.

Pour the batter into the lined loaf tin, then arrange the fig halves, cut side up, on top of the cake.

Bake for 30 minutes, then quickly remove from the oven to top each of the fig halves with a pinch of brown sugar before returning to bake until browned and cooked through, roughly another 20 minutes.

When done carefully remove the cake from the tin (it can stick a little, so run a knife along the edges) and cool on a wire rack for 5-10 minutes before serving.

Need some inspiration for finger foods for your independent toddlers?
Here is just what you are looking for and it comes endorsed by a fussy little miss!

Miss One has always loved the taste of the quiches she has tried off our plates. So, together with the search for finger food ideas, the idea for toddler-sized frittatas made in muffin tins was born.

Because I try to avoid adding actual salt to bub’s food, I used some shaved ham together with the cheddar cheese for a great savoury flavour. You really don’t need much ham at all – it’s amazing just how far a little shaved ham goes to giving the frittata a real lift. Leeks are wonderful and sweet when cooked and work really well with egg. And zucchini – I find this vegetable very versatile for cooking for bubs as they are mild flavoured and easy to grate so it’s super easy to hide some essential vitamins into bub’s dinner (zucchini is a great source of vitamin C!).

These are actually very tasty so they definitely could work brilliantly as finger food for your next grown up party (ha! when would that be?!).

Just a tip — to save yourself a precious half hour scrubbing your muffin tins — either make sure your non-stick tins are very well oiled or, better still, use silicon muffin trays! I am definitely going to invest in some of the latter before my next batch of mini frittatas!

Below is my recipe — to save you from having to write it out, save or print the page and then having to file it, why don’t you test out our free recipe app and you’ll never lose your recipes again!

Wow! These toddlers are serious eating machines! I’m not sure I eat that much as an adult! So this got me thinking. I definitely need to get Miss One’s dairy intake up now that She won’t get it from me. She isn’t a huge fan of drinking loads of cow’s milk so I need a way to combine it into something more appealing.

Aha! Something sweet! A dessert! And that is how this banana bread and butter pudding came about.

It uses lots of milk = dairy ✓

Fruit = vitamins ✓

Bread = carbs ✓

Egg = protein ✓

Genius! I had never considered bread and butter pudding as such a complete nutritional powerhouse!! 🙂

And if you are anything like our little household of 3, we never ever get through a whole loaf of bread before it enters stale territory so this recipe is perfect for rescuing that poor neglected half loaf. All the ingredients are pantry and fridge staples so it really is a handy little recipe to keep in your back pocket for that evening that you feel like a little bit of a sweet treat.

For this recipe, I have chosen to slow Miss One’s slippery slope towards getting a sweet tooth like both her parents so I limited the use of sugar by adding sultanas and cinnamon to the pudding as natural sweeteners. But as its a sizeable dessert, you can choose to jazz up half of it for grownup tastebuds and add some chopped hazelnuts or praline to the filling and serve with a dollop of cream or ice-cream!

Anyway, I’ve gone on too long – here is the magic recipe of a dessert that Miss One enjoyed both warm (on the first night) and cold straight out of the fridge on the second. Also because of the soft but dense consistency, it was perfect for Miss One to test out her spoon skills in self feeding.

Whisk the eggs in a large measuring cup. Add vanilla essence, sugar and milk and whisk until well combined.

Butter both sides of your bread. Cut them into fingers. Arrange fingers in a single layer to cover the the whole base of dish. Pour 1/3 of custard mixture over the bread.

Cut banana into half centimetre slices and arrange on top of bread. Scatter most of the sultanas on top. Lightly sprinkle cinnamon over.

Arrange a second layer of bread fingers on top of the fruit. Pour remainder of custard mixture evenly over and sprinkle more cinnamon on top.

Allow to rest for 5 minutes while the custard soaks into the bread.

Bake for 18 minutes or until custard is set and top is golden.

Notes

The bread is really very flexible. Depending on the size of your bread, you will need 6-8 slices to have two layers coverage of your medium sized baking dish. You can choose to have the crusts on or off which will also impact the size of your sizes. [br]PLUS you can experiment with different breads eg fruit toast is one that I love using as it already has “in-built” sultanas and spice so even less work and more flavour!

Recipe

I don’t bake all that often (Jane certainly has that covered), and when it comes to cakes I’ve stuck to the pretty traditional butter, sugar, eggs and flour formula. But I’ve always been intrigued by yoghurt and olive oil based cakes, so when I came across this Lemony Yoghurt Cake recipe from London Bakes I stashed it away for later reference.

My opportunity came when Jane bought home a beautiful, weighty pomegranate with no plan to use it in mind. A little naughty, because this pom was imported from the US, but it was a stunner. (The season starts soon enough in Australia so you can hang in until then if you want to buy local.)

My Tweaks

I made a couple of tweaks to this recipe. The major one, no doubt, was turning it from a lemony cake into a limey one. Now I know this sounds terrible as a name, particularly to the English (sorry, London Bakes!) but I had a hunch the flavour would work well and stand out. Based on Kathryn’s tip on the original recipe I also increased the zest, using some lemon plus two limes (just check the name of this blog after all!).

My other tweak is pictured above: garnishing with a few crushed pistachios along with the recommended pomegranate. Certainly not necessary but I think it adds nice colour, flavour and texture!

Challenges and Tips

The recipe was clear and easy to put together, even easier than a more traditional cake. The batter is quite wet so easily spread into the tin. The only challenge I had was getting it out afterwards! I used a greased, non-stick tin and lined the bottom. Unfortunately, because the cake edges are quite sticky, one corner stuck and broke on removal! Next time I’ll use a better lining as you can see Kathryn does in her original post.

Verdict

Win. This cake came out super moist but not too heavy, laced with beautiful fragrant lime. It doesn’t rise too much and even sinks a little when it cools as Kathryn warns. It’s right on the edge of too moist I’d say, so I might try a little more flour next time just as an experiment. But the proof is in the eating and Jane and I (with a little help from Miss One) completely demolished this cake. It didn’t last long enough for any visitors to even see it, so it’s lucky we have photo evidence!

As a follow up for my previous post, here is a fresh yet hearty salad I’ve perfected recently. The initial inspiration for this recipe came from a similar salad at a local cafe Ciao Thyme. This is the closest answer Balmain has to the amazing Ottolenghi cafes (London, I miss you!). Yotam himself has a hand in this by introducing barberries into my pantry: these little Persian jewels look like ruby currants and have a wonderful burst of sourness that complements many dishes. I found mine at the local Essential Ingredient, but if you can’t get hold of them Ottolenghi suggests soaking currants in lemon juice as an alternative.

The base of this salad is fresh fresh fresh. Chunks of seasonal cucumber mixed with piles of mixed herbs then punctuated with crunchy pistachios and sweet and sour berries. This alone, with a simple lemon dressing, is sure to wake up your tastebuds!

Then you layer the real heart of the salad, which turns it into something new again. Flakes of delicate hot smoked trout, and those Perfect Salad Eggs. The smokiness and richness fleshes the whole dish out — with a bit of bread you’ve got lunch sorted. Or throw it into the middle of the table as part of a dinner party feast, your guests haven’t tried anything quite like it before!

Hot Smoked Trout Herb Salad

Recipe Type: Salad

Prep time: 25 mins

Cook time: 7 mins

Total time: 32 mins

Serves: 4-6 (as a side)

A fresh green base laced with sweet and sour touches then topped with smoky fish and soft boiled eggs, this salad will wake up your tastebuds!

Ingredients

For the base:

1 large cucumber

6 spring onions

1 medium bunch parsley, roughly chopped

1 small bunch mint, roughly chopped

1 small handful dill, torn

1/4 cup pistachios, lightly crushed

2-3 tablespoons currants

2-3 tablespoons barberries

For topping:

100g hot smoked trout

4 eggs

black pepper

For the dressing:

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons lemon juice (half a lemon will suffice)

a good pinch of salt

Instructions

Start the eggs first so they will be ready for topping later. Bring a small saucepan of water to a very gentle boil then add the eggs slowly (to avoid cracking the shells). Assuming the eggs are cold from the fridge they should be simmered for 7 minutes then drained and immediately added to a bowl of room temperature water to cool for later handling.

Halve the cucumber lengthwise then scoop out the seeds with a spoon. Dice into 1cm cubes.

Clean the spring onions and slice, on an angle, into 2mm thick pieces.

Who needs a recipe to boil an egg? As it turns out: I did! I love using eggs in salads, they add a richness and body that can turn a simple side into a meal. The problem is that boiled eggs can be tricky: if underdone they make a mess, if overdone the yolks are chalky and unpleasant. So I’ve worked on a low-fuss, reliable way to get my boiled eggs Just So for salads, with the following requirements:

The yolks must be as soft as possible while still holding in the egg when cut and (gently) tossed into a salad. Oozy eggs are great for other uses, but not my salads. Chalky eggs are good for nothing!

It must work on standard sized eggs (around 55-57g, sold as large in Australia).

It must work on eggs from the fridge. I don’t want to have to wait for eggs to come to room temperature, as that takes a long (and variable) amount of time.

It must eliminate as many variables as possible, so it is reliable. For example, I don’t like methods where the eggs are put into cold water then brought to the boil, because the time to boil varies based on several factors (volume of water, heat of stove, starting water temperature).

After a bit of experimentation, I have a method that delivers all of the above, and is almost foolproof. Behold the results:

As you can see the yolks are barely set, so they squish a little when cutting but hold in the whites. You can even quarter the eggs with care and the yolks will stay in place. These are my Perfect Salad Eggs!

Perfect Salad Eggs

Prep time: 3 mins

Cook time: 7 mins

Total time: 10 mins

A simple method to get eggs Just So for use in salads.

Ingredients

55g eggs, from the fridge

Instructions

Prepare a bowl full of room temperature water, deep enough to cover the eggs, for cooling later.

Heat a saucepan of water so that it is barely simmering, i.e. you see only a few bubbles rising.

Using a spoon, carefully add each egg to the water. To avoid the shells cracking (from the sudden temperature change), dip and remove each egg a couple of times before gently lowering them to the bottom of the pan. This is the only part of the process that could go wrong, so take a little care.

Keep the water on a bare simmer for 7 minutes, then drain and immediately add the eggs to the bowl of room temperature water to cool.

When the eggs are cool enough to handle peel them by tapping the bottom on a hard surface to crack, then working the shell off from the bottom up with your fingertips.

Leave the eggs whole until ready to serve, then halve (or quarter) and toss gently into your salad.

Notes

Eggs can be tricky to peel, as the shell can stick. There are a few supposed tricks to help, but the only thing I’ve found that makes a difference is using older eggs.

This new creation is inspired by one of our most popular recipes from last year, the Fragrant Orange Cake with Spiced Golden Syrup. As a winter dessert I’d been wanting to create a proper steamed pudding to get that beautifully soft yet moist texture. It does take a little more effort to prepare the pudding cups for steaming, but you just can’t get the same texture in a regular cake.

After playing with different approaches, I’ve finally settled on the combination of fragrant zest and punchy cardamom, steamed into perfect little puds each soaked with sticky orange syrup. I’ve made the recipe to serve four as you can manage this with a single large orange (and four pudding cups just fit into my double steamer!). This portion makes plenty of syrup to serve on the side so you can keep drenching that pudding as you eat! Add a dollop of cream if you like, but I’ve moderated the sugar such that these little beauties are perfect just as they come.

Syrupy Orange and Cardamom Steamed Puddings

Prep time: 30 mins

Cook time: 25 mins

Total time: 55 mins

Serves: 4

The perfect comfort dessert for a winter night, you’ll be glowing with citrus warmth!

Ingredients

125g butter, softened

75g caster sugar

3 eggs

125g self-raising flour

1 1/2 teaspoons ground cardamom

Zest of 1 large orange, finely grated

2-3 tablespoons milk

For the syrup:

160ml orange juice

120g caster sugar

Instructions

First you need to start the syrup. Finely grate the zest of your orange and set aside for later. Now juice the orange and strain 160ml into a small saucepan (to remove the pulp). (If you have less juice you can scale down the sugar in the next step.)

Add the 120g of caster sugar to the saucepan bring the mixture to a simmer over a medium heat, stirring to dissolve. Continue simmering for about 15 minutes to reduce to a thicker syrup. Cool small spoonfuls of syrup to test the thickness as it reduces. (Always keep an eye on a reducing syrup, as it reaches high enough heat it can boil over very quickly, if you see it frothing take it off the heat and check if it’s ready.)

While the syrup is reducing you can start your pudding batter. Add the butter and sugar into a mixing bowl and beat until light and creamy (a standing mixer is best if you have one).

Add the eggs one at a time, combining each one well before adding the next.

Remove the bowl from the mixer. Sift in the flour and cardamom and add the orange zest. Fold to combine the dry ingredients into the batter.

At this point you should have a smooth batter, but it may still be a bit thick. For moist puddings you need to bring the batter to a dropping consistency (where it will readily slide off a tilted spoon under its own weight) by gradually adding milk. Add milk a spoonful at a time, stirring well and testing the consistency until it is ready.

Grease four individual pudding cups with a little butter, then add a tablespoon of orange syrup to each one. Divide the batter evenly among the cups but be sure to leave some room for expansion (at least 1cm). Even out the surface of the batter in each cup.

Cover the cups with a square of baking paper then a square of foil, pleated in the middle allow extra expansion room. Secure the coverings to the cups with twine.

Cook the puddings in a double steamer over boiling water until just cooked through, about 22-25 minutes. Remove from the steamer and allow to cool slightly before uncovering and turning out of the cups. You may need to carefully run a knife around the edge of the cup to dislodge the puddings.

Serve warm with extra syrup at the ready!

Notes

If you don’t have pudding cups then ramekins or even teacups can be used in their place. Keep in mind that cooking time will vary based on the shape of the cups, though!